The complexity of the pattern of runways and thoroughfares of certain airports and their increasingly heavy traffic are posing more and more problems of orientation and of security for an aircraft moving on their thoroughfares in poor visibility conditions at night or in bad weather. To remedy this, it has been proposed to display on a screen of an aircraft flight deck a map of the thoroughfares of the airport in which it is moving, drawn from a cartographic database on board the aircraft or accessible to the aircraft via a data transmission link, with mention of the current position of the aircraft originating from an onboard location system such as a satellite positioning receiver and/or an inertial unit, and the mention of current positions and registration numbers of the mobiles moving on the surface or close to the surface of the airport communicated to the aircraft by radio link, by means of a system that is cooperative, such as ADS-B (“Automatic Dependence Surveillance-Broadcast”) or that is centralized, such as TIS-B (“Traffic Information Service-Broadcast”). A description of various industrial prototypes of airport map flight deck display systems currently proposed appears appended to the study by Michelle YEH entitled “Human Factors Considerations in the Design and Evaluation of Moving Map Display of Ownship on the Airport Surface” DOT/FAA/AR-O4/39, published in September 2004, by U.S. Department of Transportation, Research and Special Programs Administration John A Volpe National Transportation Systems Center Cambridge, Mass. 02142.
These airport traffic map displays with transfers of the current positions of the aircraft and of the surrounding traffic poses the problem of legibility. To respond to this, it has been proposed, for example in French patent FR. 2.837.591 or in American patent U.S. Pat. No. 7,109,889, to provide the display system with a possibility of adjusting the scale and level of detail of the map. However, it remains that, in an airport zone with heavy traffic, a large number of mobiles and in particular all the aircraft having their on-board instruments in operation, whether they are parked or moving, communicate their positions and registration numbers that are transferred to the traffic map displayed on the flight deck, making it hard to read.